The initial results of clinical trials regarding the use of an approved drug for the treatment of dyslipidemia in relation to the reduction of the severity of the infection caused by SARS-CoV-2 were positive.
“Whilst vaccine programmes will hopefully reduce infection rates and virus spread in the longer term, there is still an urgent need to expand our arsenal of drugs to treat SARS-CoV-2-positive patients,” said Dr Farhat Khanim, of the University of Birmingham.
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In response to the global pandemic of COVID-19, the researchers tested a panel of already-licensed drugs — including fenofibrate — to identify candidates that disrupt ACE2 and Spike interactions. After identifying fenofibrate as a candidate, they evaluated the drug’s efficacy in reducing infection in laboratory cells using the original SARS-CoV-2 virus strains isolated in 2020.
They discovered that fenofibrate reduced infection by up to 70%. Additionally, unpublished data indicate that fenofibrate is equally effective against newer SARS-CoV-2’s variants, including the alpha and beta variants, and research into its efficacy against the delta variant is ongoing.
The effectiveness of the use of fenofibrate in reducing coronavirus infection was significant and was achieved using safe concentrations of the drug according to the standard clinical dose.
In this study, the researchers tried various treatments that could stop the interaction of the ACE2 receptor and the coronavirus protein spike. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 infection, infects cells through its spike protein with the ACE2 receptor, which is located on the outside of many cells.
To test the effectiveness of fenofibrate in reducing cell infection, they first used strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus isolated in 2020. What they concluded was that fenofibrate was able to reduce infection by up to 70%.
The research team is trying to extend the research to inpatients with coronavirus, thus enriching the research data of the two ongoing clinical trials at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in the USA and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
In addition, unpublished data suggest that fenofibrate is also effective against new mutations, such as the Alpha and Beta mutations, and research is ongoing to confirm its efficacy against the newer Delta mutation.
“Our data indicates that fenofibrate may have the potential to reduce the severity of COVID-19 symptoms and also virus spread,” said Dr Elisa Vicenzi, co-author of the study at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan.
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“Given that fenofibrate is an oral drug which is very cheap and available worldwide, together with its extensive history of clinical use and its good safety profile, our data has global implications — especially in low-middle income countries.“
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